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- They don't expect any level of hybrid graphics support for Ubuntu 12.10, but maybe for Ubuntu 13.04. They're not really looking to do any major upstream work, but just waiting for the work being done by David Airlie at Red Hat and others to get their work finished.

As always, Canonical is just a consumer - consuming the real, hard work others are doing.
Compared to Red Hat, which contributes to more or less the full range of important OSS projects, Canonical is far too busy with their own stuff (upstart, unity, ...) to give a lot valueable back to the community.

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Well, they are doing their own thing: upstart, unity, software centre, etc.

They are positioning themselves as an inexpensive Mac clone that, only by chance, has Linux under the hood. I don't think that they've ever had a major impact on any GNU or Linux-related project, other than their own stuff.

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As always, Canonical is just a consumer - consuming the real, hard work others are doing.
Compared to Red Hat, which contributes to more or less the full range of important OSS projects, Canonical is far too busy with their own stuff (upstart, unity, ...) to give a lot valueable back to the community.

Read the hybrid notes. Exact opposite of what Michael wrote. The Ubuntu-X team has all of the problems identified and know what to do this cycle. There's a lot of code landing in this release that will help towards it. There will also be upstream participation and coordination.

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As always, Canonical is just a consumer - consuming the real, hard work others are doing.
Compared to Red Hat, which contributes to more or less the full range of important OSS projects, Canonical is far too busy with their own stuff (upstart, unity, ...) to give a lot valueable back to the community.

They are positioning themselves as an inexpensive Mac clone that, only by chance, has Linux under the hood. I don't think that they've ever had a major impact on any GNU or Linux-related project, other than their own stuff.

Laying aside the fact that they do contribute upstream (not so much as Red Hat, obviously, and not in the kernel/driver space), I think Ubuntu has had a huge and beneficial effect on the entire linux ecosystem. Because of Ubuntu, many more people are running linux. Many more OEMs and commercial software companies are considering linux. The public perception of linux is raised. All of which in turn means more people try it. This means more development, more bugs discovered and fixed and so on.

Writing code isn't the only (or even the main) contribution that can be made to a software ecosystem.

Also, the majority of linux users run Ubuntu for a reason. If you like, you can argue they are all misguided, insane, led astray by evil marketing or stupid. Personally, I think it'd be a silly argument, though.

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Laying aside the fact that they do contribute upstream (not so much as Red Hat, obviously, and not in the kernel/driver space), I think Ubuntu has had a huge and beneficial effect on the entire linux ecosystem. Because of Ubuntu, many more people are running linux. Many more OEMs and commercial software companies are considering linux. The public perception of linux is raised. All of which in turn means more people try it. This means more development, more bugs discovered and fixed and so on.

In principle, I agree with you, and overall my opinion of Ubuntu is rather neutral because of this. There has always been a real need for a "newbie" distro, and nobody had managed to fill this niche before Ubuntu (many had tried).

But it seems that they are trying to do their own thing. Their webpage doesn't even mention Linux (it's always the "Ubuntu Operating System, faster than PC, prettier than Mac"), they are pushing their own technologies instead of working with the rest (upstart, unity, appstore...), and they prefer to maintain their own patchsets rather than contributing upstream (I don't know if this has changed).